markellion's video: Colonial stereotypes Arab and Sudan

As long as we rely more on imagination than evidence and rely more on stereotypes than logic we will never make any progress in studying history. The stereotype is that of influences only going in one direction as if there is some kind of mental block in people conceiving of influences going from south to north. All of these little things added up together become something big. While Arab influence is important that is not the only aspect of it and history is portrayed in a way that the influence of African societies will not be taken into consideration. People constantly but subconsciously twist things in such a way that immediately portrays the possibility of African influence as being an impossibility Unnatural and ever prejudicial Constructions of Race and Colonial Hierarchies by British observers in 19th century Zanzibar Electronic pages 13 and 14 http://cua.wrlc.org/bitstream/1961/5523/1/etd_jwd35.pdf In a discussion of race and colonial discourse, Homi Bhabha has described the stereotype as a form of knowledge and identification that facilitates between what is always in place, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated As if the essential duplicity of the Asiatic or the bestial sexual license of the African that needs no proof, can never, in discourse, be proved. In dual character as that which is already known and yet dependent on being anxiously repeated suggests an important aspect of the racial stereotype that is revealed in its use and function in many colonial sources. We always already know that blacks are licentious, Asiatics duplicitous The stereotype becomes an element of unproven prior knowledge that needs no proof of its veracity for its employment as explanation for racialized difference. The Redemption of Africa By Frederic Perry Noble http://books.google.com/books?id=vdxBAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA70 =onepage&q=&f=false "The assumption that Sudanese civilization is wholly due to Islam has but doubtful validity. Reclus has shown that thousands of years before Islam the Negro had shared in civilizing work: "From remotest antiquity Africans, even beyond Egypt, took part in man's triumphs over nature . . . The civilized world is indebted to the natives for several domestic animals. Even in industries Africa has contributed to the inheritance of mankind. The monuments of Egypt can not all have been the work of the Rotu [Egyptians] alone. Among the products of Egyptian industry are frequently recognized forms recurring in Nubia and Sudan. Smelting and working iron have been attributed to the Negroes. The Bongo as well as other African tribes constructed furnaces of very ingenious type The tribe was acquainted with the art of minting. Among the Ogowai Fans bits of iron are current coins in common use". The Negro, when independent of outside influences, has shown native capacity for material advancement, self=elevation and state=building. The Ashanti and Dahomans, true Negroes, typical Guinea Negroes, spontaneously developed considerable civilizations*. They were realms of woman's rights. The Dahoman culture is credited with having elicited admiration from Herbert Spencer. The Mangbattu and Zande on the water=shed draining toward the Kongo, the Nile and the Shari amazed Schweinfurth, — the former by the high development of the industries and the sentiment of nationality; the latter, little inferior in material civilization, by their Christian respect for woman. According to Baker the pagan Nyoro of Lake Albert had independently "developed administration, sub=governors, taxes, good clothing, art, agriculture and architecture". Uganda was not inferior, but as its ruling race is of Hamitic extraction, possibly this civilization can not be credited to the Negro. No such hesitancy need be felt as to the Kongo and Zambezi peoples. Before the appearance of Arabs or Europeans, these Negroes had originated empires and republics possessing complex governmental arrangements. Some at least were not without the elements of true civilization. Whatever Islam may have done for the Negro was in being, not the initial impulse for his advance, but the reinforcement of his native faculties. Even in Sudan it has merely aided, not created his capacity for progress. But "Islam is a reform which has stifled all other reforms. It has chained every people which has accepted it to a certain stage of moral and political growth". The sterility and unprogressiveness of Negro civilizations, Negro states, are as much due to the paralyzing death=grip of Islam as to nature's foreclosure of his intellectual powers when she mortgages the growth of his brain after puberty."